Assignment 1 (Me, Myself and I) - Processes

For assignment 1, my task is to integrate my name into a design. I listed down the things I like or dislike, and also what I like to do. Some of which are: love to eat (corn, fish), ghost movies, sleeping, hate global warming, etc.

I drew some random sketches, such as the globe. I used my name and made them into islands. I then tried to draw the globe engulfed in smoke but then it would cover my name. So i just left it first.

Next to it is a drawing of a corn. I tried to draw those corn kernels, which made up my name, to look like they are eaten. But it looks kind of messy there. pardon my drawing =/
Below is a drawing related to what i love to do! SLEEP. I played around with different sleeping positions. I had no problem with T-I-N but I was having a hard time with coming up a sleeping position for G.

Then I went on to draw some horror stuffs. I enjoy watching horror movies, but I'm scared of ghosts. RED ghosts. contradicting huh. I drew a cross representing "t", then a female ghost for "i", a stone memorial for "n" and a girl hanging from a tree dead as a "g". I drew it this way is because I am having an ULTRA HUGE ulcer and it makes me feel like killing myself. so the girl killed herself and turned into a ghost, awaiting to revenge ULCER.

So.. here's my initial sketch :)

I went on to try to draw different designs for each of the letters. Here's the T.


Here's the I. i designed my own plant! one horror version and one fantansy version. then I tried to draw a windmill... nah. doesn't even look close to the real thing.


Here's the N. I drew a honey house with biscuit windows. It turned out to be quite delicious. and then there's the half-eaten donut which looks like a magnet -.-"


Here's the g. I played around with the shape of the tree trunk. I also tried to draw a chocolate pool (because i love chocolates) but it didn't look like one.

Basically by the end of this stage I kind of already made up my mind of what to draw. It would be either my own fantasy world, or a horror world. 2 opposite ends :) So i tried to experiment further with what my drawing could look like... I drew the ice-cream mountains with the vanilla rain (wanted it to look like an "i" with the sun but it turned out not to look like).

For the horror side I want to include those dark figures wearing dark robes in horror/evil movies so I tried to draw one. I learnt it from a website. but my version looks too un-scary.


So I developed 3 roughs from all the ideas I got from the sketches.

#1: Stop global warming. "Ting" actually sounds exactly like "Stop" in chinese. So the meaning in this design is to ask people to STOP GLOBAL WARMING. I shaded the 2 more serious factors which contribute to this GW (the car and meat factory). Logging is also a problem which leads to GW. The tiny tree in the right bottom suggest that we should grow more trees and save our Earth! I have to work on the silhouette of the factory because it doesn't suggest a factory at all. If the pig and cow heads weren't there, my friends had a hard time guessing what that silhouette was representing.


#2: Living in my own world. I always dream about living in this fantasy land made out of food.. almost similar to the animation "cloudie with a chance of meatballs". I drew some mushroom trees (T), the tall grass with a flower lamp (i) , honey-choco house (N) and candy floss tree (g). I'm going to improve on the layout, because I feel that the right section looks too cramped. I also need to work out the colours as the honey-chocolate house and the tree trunk has the same colour, and it might make the picture look unbalanced.


Last but not least,
#3: Evil side. I changed a little from my initial sketch. I drew a tombstone with a cross on top (t), a grim reaper holding a weapon (i), normal tombstone with a hole (n) and a moon with a long stretch of road for (g). I took away the person hanging down because I think after a while it looks kind of disturbing.


I realised that I had quite a number of drawings relating to evil or ghosts. I can explain that this is because of my ULCER. The ULCER is like a persistent ghost who wouldn't leave you alone until you call upon a ghost buster (SALT) to chase this ghost (ULCER) away.

Ok back to the topic. I think that I have learnt quite many things from this assignment, in terms of drawing, and also the development of ideas from very basic sketches. I feel that some times I would get stuck and have very limited ideas of what to draw or design. However, everytime I doodle something, something new would pop into my mind.

Although this sounds good, but it can be a hindrance too in the sense that because new ideas keep appearing, i tend to be fickle in terms of choosing the final design.

By sketching, I have also learnt that I will not know if I can draw a particular thing unless I try. Sometimes I could not get the picture that I want and did not look like the thing I'm trying to draw at all. But after changing lines and there and redoing the drawings, the pictures I draw look more reasonable.

I hope that I can complete my piece of work (the digitised version) because I am still not very used to using illustrator pen. I'm still practicing, and I hope my work will turn out successful.

Lecture Exercise 2 (Constructive Criticism)

For this lesson we were supposed to try to give a constructive criticism on a picture based on a model (Description, Analysis, Interpretation and Judgment).

the picture was a poster of the movie "Avatar".

Description (WHAT is there):
- blue avatar (staring at me) on the foreground.
- forest on the background.
- Macdonald's logo on the top right corner.
- some small texts on the bottom of the poster which I couldn't see.

Analysis (HOW things are presented, emphasis on relationships):
- the Avatar and the forest kind of suggest that the character lives in the forest.
- Macdonald's logo suggest that this is their promotional poster.

Interpretation (meaning, effects):
- I think that this picture is trying to tell me that there is another planet out there with all these forests and creatures. It's like another perfect world exist other than Earth (which doesn't have such beautiful forests now, and not so perfect, and is being destroyed by humans).
- It makes me want to live in such a place and leaves me wondering if such a place exist.
- also, since the graphics are like those in computer games, my first impression was that it was a movie made from a game.

Judgment (successes, shortcomings):
- It is successful in a way that it leaves people fantasizing about such a perfect planet.
- the short comings are (I would say), in the graphic presentations. The picture is not very clear and the words at the bottom are too small to see.
- the Avatar's face look kind of fake (I'm not sure though).
- but afterall we must see the movie before we are able to understand this poster.

yes i've watched the movie.

Illustrator Practice 2

Made an icecream.
Colours of the cone = fail.

Illustrator Practice 1

I am not very familiar with Illustrator so I needed some practice... my first vector drawing! it took me quite some time to do the notepad...

what I did was created a rectangle and filled in with a multi-gradient gradient, and adjusted the gradient angle such that it looks just like many papers together! However it can be better if I added more colour points to the gradient.

Lecture Exercise 1

It's my first lecture for 2208 :)
We were asked to design a machine/device that could enhance our creativity by 100x!

My initial idea was to draw an electronic touch-screen drawing paper that could "read" what I intended to draw and give me 100 variations of it. Or maybe a computer where I can type in what I want to draw about and it can give me 100 ideas!

So I ended up inventing this ART MONSTER, which is like an artist's drawing board.
There's a push-button colour palette and some pens (for drawing on the virtual paper) on the side on the screen.




Basically I think touch-screen is the best and easiest way to get immediate and effective results!